Dallas-based artist Alison Starr worked with the T/AP students during a two-session workshop that covered the history of Performance Art up to examples of contemporary practices. Alison received her MFA from the University of Texas at Arlington with an emphasis in intermedia studio practices, and she co-founded Performance Southwest. Human nature/behavior, interactions, and private thoughts inspire her work, much of which is autobiographical. Her current body of work includes writing and performing both live and in video presentations.

The fourth artist the T/AP students had the opportunity to work with this year was Dallas-based painter, designer, writer, and fanatical Dallas Mavericks fan Zeke Williams. Zeke recently had his first solo show, Heat Check at Erin Cluley Gallery in Dallas, and was included in Black & White, a group exhibition at Eugene Binder Gallery in Marfa.

For our final session with Michelle Rawlings, students were instructed to send her the names of cultural icons they associated with. Names included Stephen Colbert, James Dean, and Judge Judy. Students were provided with preselected and appropriated images of these figures and asked to depict them with chalk pastels.

For the second session with Michelle Rawlings, T/AP students created miniature paper doll self-portraits painted with watercolor and gouache. Michelle asked the students to examine Kehinde Wiley’s use of fashion and scale in his exhibition Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic by implementing reduction and miniaturization into their own self-portraits.

On November 8, T/AP began the first of three sessions with Dallas-based artist Michelle Rawlings. Michelle received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2012, with a concentration in painting. She recently had her first international solo exhibition at the Raster Gallery in Warsaw, Poland, following an exhibition at Hello Project in Houston. More information on her and her work can be found at michellerawlings.com.

After ending our session with Carlos Donjuan, we shifted gears from traditional and static forms of artmaking to learn about new media, digital design, and gifs with Houston-based artist Bradly Brown. Brown is currently an artist in residence at Lawndale Art Center, designer at semigloss. Magazine, and founding member of the experimental art collective HOMECOMING! Committee.

For our next two Sundays with Dallas-based artist and educator Carlos Don Juan, T/AP students continued to develop their masks and integrate them into a large backdrop painting. Students were grouped into pairs, leading to conversations, creative negotiations, and an opportunity to collaborate and familiarize themselves with their peers.

The content that found its way into the backdrop paintings included Jules de Balincourt references, neon skylines, iPhone screensavers, and pine trees.

The end of the 2014–2015 program was marked by the annual T/AP exhibition at Gallery 414 in Fort Worth, with a robust turnout of family and friends at the opening reception. The art was elegantly curated and installed, displaying highlights from our months of hard work with a remarkable and varied roster of artists as teachers. For the duration of the exhibition, students and interns operated open hours for the gallery, continuing to have conversations about their work and experiences from the Teen/Artist Project.

This week, we visited galleries and museums in the Dallas Arts District. We began at Zhulong Gallery, a new media gallery exhibiting photographs and videos of Rhizome founder Mark Tribe. We also visited exhibitions at Photographs Do Not Bend, the Dallas Contemporary, and Cydonia.

It was an exciting day for the Teen/Artist Project due to a rare opportunity to visit The Warehouse, a private collection space in Dallas. Thomas Feulmer, the curator of education, led a tour of the exhibition Geometries On and Off the Grid: Art from 1950 to the Present.

Margaret Meehan is the final Teen/Artist Project instructor of the 2014–2015 program. Margaret received her MFA from the University of Washington, and her work deals with images of feral behavior, medical anomalies, and barren landscapes. Innocence collides with the monstrous as her work questions constructions of race, gender, and the erasure of cultural memory.

Our final class with Shelby David Meier continued with the theme of conceptual instruction games. Students were assigned to teams to create games for the entire class to play. The activities included scavenger hunts, selfies, videos, and even drawings.

For our third session with Shelby David Meier, the students played a conceptual game created by the artist. To set the tone, the class watched videos by the artist Koki Tanaka highlighting problems that emerge with group collaboration. The game was separated into four parts: accuracy, listing, drawing, and creating. A piece of white paper was divided into quadrants, and each quadrant represented a distinct game. The class was split into two teams in order to promote competition. The result was a visual collection of diverse components, including drawings, numbers, and even spit wads.

Last week, T/AP students executed a list of instructions created by artist Shelby David Meier in a project influenced by conceptual work in the Modern’s collection. Their homework was to come up with their own instructions for their peers to execute. In class, Shelby presented an interview with seminal conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner to provide inspiration and context. It was exciting to see how detailed and complex some of the students’ directions became. Some relied on a list to become a drawing, while others relied on a drawing to become a list.